"I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point..."

“Teach My Little Sister How To Drive” is an early-release game demo on Steam. You speak to the game and tell the sister character what to do, and you see if you can get her not to crash _this_ time. The whole interface is voice. It’s a cute little idea. [_Steam_ _,__archive_] How can we get a game to understand speech? We feed the voice to a chatbot, obviously! The Steam AI disclosure says: > The user can freely interact with NPCs in the game world through voice chat. The sister’s voice is generated in real time using a local model. Maybe it generates the voice locally, but the full AI disclosure page says the game sends your voice commands to a chatbot — over the online API, not locally. Then it gets back chatbot-generated responses. [_Easy Fox Games_ _,__archive_] This is a fully chatbot game. It’s functionally a text adventure game with pictures. But instead of the developers writing the dialogue, they’re generating it! There’s one unfortunate problem. The developers announced a few days ago that running just the demo version of the game was costing them $1000 a day for the AI. [_Steam_ _,__archive_] This is a game with an all-time peak of 431 players — which is not a lot — up to the announcement post. They’re spending about $70 per month per player. The developers have taken out a _bank loan_ to keep the demo running. A free demo where the whole way the game works relies on a paid service. The financial end game here is not clear. Who will pay for this in the release version? The developers think the players will: > For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price. This is the sort of momentarily amusing throwaway idea you drop five or ten dollars on, if that. Teaching a dead eyed sister-bot how to drive is not a $70 a month game. Do they think they can sell the data on teaching AI to drive for training? Like gamers won’t compete on how spectacular a car crash they can achieve. Maybe the devs think if they just lose enough money on AI, Nvidia will buy them out? They’re even floating the idea of the game using a local model if the API performance is slow. Doing better than the API would need graphic workstation levels of video card at minimum. That’s not a large market. The number of people watching the game on Steam has gone through the roof in the past couple of days. How many of those do you think are seeing if they can bankrupt the studio? Or reverse-engineer the game to extract the chatbot access codes and get free tokens. Live by the slop, die by the slop. Somebody’s going to lose their house to running this game. And they won’t learn a thing. All my apes, gone. * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ ### Share this post: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### _Related_

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